


Questions, Memories

by PatternsInTheIvy



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27276997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PatternsInTheIvy/pseuds/PatternsInTheIvy
Summary: ... Riley's mind won't stop posing her that one question. And that is the seed of accusation that has grown, sprouted branches, and that has developed roots so deep that she doesn't think they can ever be reached and cut out.Had Jack stayed, would Mac still be alive?
Relationships: Jack Dalton & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), Riley Davis & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	Questions, Memories

**Author's Note:**

> So, yeah, this is 1.7k words of pure and unadulterated angst. 
> 
> Warning: There are a few descriptions of injuries; nothing explicit, though.
> 
> Unbetaed, all mistakes are my own.

Jack comes back eight months after he left.

Almost three months after…

After that night.

Riley knows - she knows that it wasn't his fault, not really. But she can't keep the accusation out of her mind, and she knows that it must show in her eyes. 

What happened three months ago gets mixed with what happened more than a decade ago, and all that she knows is that Jack leaves. It's a constant inconstancy in her life.

He left once, removing from her life the closest thing she had to a father. And he left again, and this time she had to see a person she'd come to think of as family die.

And it's not that she isn't glad that Jack is alive, that he came back from hunting Kovacs, but… grief still takes up most of the space in her heart. Another significant part of it is occupied by cold numbness and fiery, all-consuming anger. Only a dark, distant and tiny corner remains there available for anything else.

More than that, Riley's mind won't stop posing her  _ that _ one question. And that is the seed of accusation that has grown, sprouted branches, and that has developed roots so deep that she doesn't think they can ever be reached and cut out.

Had Jack stayed, would Mac still be alive?

** ** ** **

Jack comes back eight months after leaving to hunt down Tiberius Kovacs. He thought that had been Hell. 

He takes a few days for himself, a few days to try and leave everything that happened there behind him. He’d planned on waiting a week, but on the fourth day, Matty Webber calls him. Yeah, he’d been foolish to hope that she wouldn’t be aware of his whereabouts. 

There is something wrong, though. Even if he can’t point out exactly how or why he knows this, Matty is out of her element when she reaches out to him. It’s nothing that she says, or her tone of voice. Maybe it is something that she doesn’t say. 

When he asks about the team, she tells him that they are out on a mission, unreachable. 

She asks to see him as soon as possible.

And so, two days later, Jack finds himself in the war room. Like the way that he knew that something was off because of what Matty did not say, it is another absence that gives it away that something is, indeed, wrong. 

The table lacks a bowl of paperclips.

Jack understands it quickly. Mac has gone away again - and Matty needs Jack to go after him. She needs the kid, and knows that Jack is the only one who can find him.

His suspicions are confirmed when Matty enters the war room accompanied by Riley. So, they were not a mission after all. 

The two women look at each other, there is a silent question there, and Riley gives a tiny nod to Matty. 

Matty sits down, close to where Jack is sitting, but Riley stands away, arms crossed in front of her chest. He had expected that they might react like that when he came back, but it still unsettles him.

“Jack,” Matty says, her voice firm, so firm that it sounds like she is faking it. “I don’t think there is any other way to go about this," there is a short pause before she continues, "Mac is dead, Jack.”

As it turns out, his definition of Hell changes. 

** ** ** **

Seeing Jack learning the truth hurts all over again, because even though Riley has had time to accept the truth, time to stop waking up and wondering if it had all been a nightmare,  _ he  _ has not. 

Until Jack learned the truth, there was still someone in the world who held in his mind the untarnished image of Angus MacGyver being brilliant, solving problems, helping people. Being alive. Memories of Mac that did not include the blood, the sounds… 

But now he knows. 

The loss feels complete, irreversible.

And he denies the truth. He shakes his head, protests, and Riley can see in his eyes that he doesn’t want to believe what Matty said.

“No,” Jack says. “He wouldn’t… You’re wrong, how-how did it happen? Was it a bomb? He’s out there somewhere, we just… we just have to find him. I can’t believe you are not looking for him.”

And that, that makes Riley angry. She has no sympathy for Jack, not right now, because how dare he stand there and say they are not looking for Mac? That it is a lie? He wasn’t there.

“He died in my arms,” Riley says. She was there. 

She doesn’t say more, but the memory is there, even if she tries to keep it away - how warm the blood had been, and sometimes she has the impression that her hands are still stained crimson, can feel it seeping through her clothes…

Her words stop Jack, and he collapses against the couch, still shaking his head in denial.

** ** ** **

Matty explains what Riley clearly isn’t able to. She goes over what happened, over how the mission went wrong, she tells him about how Desi died trying to save them all, and how she is probably the reason why Riley got out alive.

Jack is ashamed that the first thing he feels knowing that Desi died is jealousy - she died doing what he should have been doing.

Matty pauses. By now her voice is not firm anymore. 

And then she goes on, telling him about how  _ it _ happened. How Riley and Mac escaped - no guns, no swiss army knife, nothing on then. They made it to exfil - a clearing in a forest near the facility they'd breached, where the chopper could land.

Only, exfil would be there in twenty minutes - the twenty minutes that Mac did not have. She tells him about the funeral, and everything that happened  _ after _ , but there is a gap that she purposefully avoids. He glances at Riley, and has to suppress a flinch when she looks back.

Matty did not lie when she said that the team was unreachable. Desi died trying to protect Mac. Bozer is gone - he’s left after the funeral. And Riley… well, Riley is there, but Jack can see the walls behind her eyes, the way she is holding herself back and away from him.

Jack has a million questions to ask, and all of them, but one, can wait. Maybe Riley will never answer them at all, but this one thing he needs to know.

"Did he…" Jack starts, but unconsciously stops himself from finishing the question. He doesn't know which answer he would prefer. 

None at all. He would have preferred not having this conversation. But that is not a choice he has - the choice he did make led here, trapping him in this moment, pushing him to ask...

So he finishes the question.

"Did he say anything?"

_ Did he have any last words for Jack? A final message? _

It hurts to think that Mac would have tried to relay any last words for Jack through Riley. That even after being left behind he would still… It also hurts to contemplate the possibility that he wouldn't. 

Similar, and yet distinct pains.

Reality - Riley's answer - hurts in a way that he hadn't anticipated.

"He tried."

Jack blinks, and some confusion must show on his face because she goes on.

"One of the bullets… it hit... Well, his lungs collapsed. He couldn’t talk."

_ He couldn’t breathe. _ Is what she doesn’t say, but Jack hears it anyway.

** ** ** **

Saying those words brings the memory to the forefront of her mind, and Riley gets lost in them for a few seconds.

She remembers the blood - warm, sticky. 

She remembers the gasping, breathless and desperate sounds.

… the way Mac opened his mouth - an attempt to breathe, and moved his blue-tinted lips, trying to form words that had no air, no sound. 

Riley remembers how he gripped her hand, at first so tight that it almost hurt her fingers. 

He'd been scared. Fearless, brave Mac died scared, and Riley doesn't even know  _ what _ he’d been fearing at that moment. She suspects that it might not have been death, but… leaving. 

The nerves in her hand can still feel the way his grip stopped hurting and grew progressively slacker...

She remembers the way his body shuddered, and most of all, she remembers his eyes, illuminated by the moon, brilliant and teary as he fought a losing battle, then unfocused, motionless as he lost it. She remembers closing them.

Riley knows that in the Phoenix Foundation archive there is a file that contains her account of what happened. It is clinical, detached. She remembers how she had described the entire thing, still in shock and high on Valium - or whatever it was that they gave her after she flipped. 

She wonders if Jack will read that report. It's no small mercy, to read that, instead of having the memories.

** ** ** **

Jack visits the grave a week later. He postpones the visit until his own cowardice becomes unbearable.

He stands there and doesn't say anything for a long time.

"Hey, Hoss," are the first words that leave his mouth. They might have been the same words that he would say to Mac if things were different.

"I don't know what to say, you know. I never… I never thought that I'd been doing this. I always figured that if you died it would mean that I'd died first trying to protect you."

Eight months - or, rather, five - five months. Jack never thought that in five months that would happen.

"I wonder if I would have been able to protect you if I were there. That question has been keeping me awake at night."

That and the memories of Mac - Mac alive, running, pulling some improvisation out of his sleeve, making crazy plans…

At least one thing he has are those. He can't reconcile those memories with a dead Mac. They are like oil and water.

"And no, I don't need you to go on about why water and oil don't mix."

Only, he would give anything to hear that right now.

"I'm gonna visit my dad and go to Texas for a while." 

Jack remembers Mac there with him, visiting his father's grave. 

"I'm gonna tell him that you said hi. Or maybe you can do that yourself, huh? Wherever you both are now."

He walks away - he doesn't say goodbye, though. 

When he's not looking at a tombstone that reads "Angus MacGyver", Jack is better at pretending that the kid is out there, somewhere, doing what he did best. It's how he wants to remember him.


End file.
